To give some context, I attended a Chinese teacher's workshop over the weekend. In that workshop, we had the opportunity to learn how students learn Chinese at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Some of the fundamental characteristics of this program are: Focusing almost exclusively on spoken Chinese the first year. Emphasis on conversation and pronunciation, with requirements to listen to CD every day and immersion classes (all Chinese) even from day 1. Beginning in the second year, the students learn to read and write, and by their third year, are able to go to China and actually work in the same environment as the native Chinese living there. We were incredibly impressed by the USF students' ability to speak naturally and with perfect pronunciation. (They didn't speak Chinese "like Americans.") :-)
I’ve been mulling over this immersion method with exclusive focus on speaking a lot since the workshop, and also about my own challenges (or advantages, depending on your perspective) of learning Chinese as a heritage speaker rather than learning from ground zero. I realized something – as a young child learning a language, I learned to speak first…and in fact, all children, regardless of language, learn to speak the language first, and gain a proficiency in speaking long before they learn to write the language. If that’s the case, and this is how their language is acquired naturally (speaking first, then writing), then why do we try to force students to learn speaking and writing at the same time? It seems like the brain may not multi-task as well, and may retain more when it has a foundation of spoken language established, and THEN add in the reading/writing. I’m sure there are studies that have been done on this, but it’s something that just occurred to me—and hearing about how Professor Shepherd at USF teaches his classes really spurred me to thinking more about this.
I’ve been inspired to modify my teaching methods to focus more on speaking, and to use the USF classes as an example of how well this can work. I believe that this will give my students more of a feeling of accomplishment and success with their ability to have a real conversation, not just individual vocabulary words. I'm also planning to look further into second language acquisition studies (Professor Shepherd at USF was kind enough to supply me with a great reading list of research in this area) in order to justify using this language teaching and learning strategy here at school. It seems that it may not be as effective for second language learners to be spending a lot of time teaching a writing system before they have gained a foundation in speaking.